THERESE DESQUEYROUX (Mongrel, 2012) D: Claude Miller, w/ Audrey Tautou, Gilles Lellouche. Rating: NNN DVD package: none Rating: NNN
Therese Desqueyroux can be viewed as an attack on the French landed gentry, a character study of a frustrated woman or a combination of both. Any way you take it, you’re likely to be left wishing the heroine were in a livelier movie.
In 1928 Bordeaux, Therese (Audrey Tatou), a frowning young woman who by her own account has a head full of unconventional ideas, marries her neighbour Bernard (Gilles Lellouche) so they can merge their estates and increase their wealth. They feel no passion, and she’s bored by his thoroughly conventional views and interests. Eventually, she commits an unpardonable act and discovers just how far her family will go to keep up appearances.
Therese’s conflict is that she both does and does not want to be part of this stuffy provincial society. The dilemma leaves her seemingly paralyzed and us with few clues but Tautou’s shut-down face. As Bernard, Lellouche is just as opaque, but his is a case of such certainty about all things.
The camera’s stillness and the expressive lighting create a sense of Therese’s oppression that gives the film forward motion even when the story doesn’t.
As usual with unheralded French imports, there are no extras. A word or two about the source novel by Francois Mauriac would have been welcome.
EXTRAS French audio. English subtitles.
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